Hecker, however, had more in mind than the (then highly unlikely) prospect of an American-born pope, when he expressed his hope that that future "sun will first rise on this continent and spread its light over the whole world." His hopeful expectation was rooted in his confident conviction that the Catholic Church had something special to offer America, which in turn had something special to offer the world. Whatever it may have made sense for Hecker to have hoped for in the 19th century, when the American empire was in its ascendancy, it is increasingly difficult to recognize the path to the fulfillment of those expectations in our present religious and political predicament. What are we to make of all this?
The great religious, social, and political forces which influenced the American scene in Hecker’s early life were the Second Great Awakening and the egalitarian democracy associated with the Jacksonian era in American politics. Hecker lived in the incandescent glow of these two formative phenomena, but their glow has sadly since gone considerably darker, with potentially catastrophic consequences for Hecker’s hopes.
More than its colonial-era predecessor, the Second Great Awakening (roughly from about 1790 to 1840) remade the United States into the very religious country it would recognizably remain until the late 20th century, what Chesterton famously called “a nation with the soul of a church,” further disposing Americans to Hecker’s proposed “renewal of religion.” Meanwhile, the older Hecker brothers were very actively involved in Jacksonian-era New York Democratic Party politics. They saw political solutions in radical democracy and focused their activity on reform movements. Their younger brother Isaac, although his focus would soon shift to more explicitly religious concerns, remained attracted to the tenets of Jacksonian democracy all his life.
Having examined the leading intellectual and religious currents of his time, paying intense attention to his own inner spiritual sensibility, Hecker had finally found his permanent home in the Roman Catholic Church. Having found fulfillment in the Catholic Church, he never desired to look farther. Rather, he desired to devote his life to helping others to find the truth in the Catholic Church. Hecker’s enthusiasm for his new faith and his commitment to the Church permeated all his subsequent activities. He “not only became a most firm believer in the mysteries of the Christian religion, but a priest and a religious, hopes thus to die.” However his canonization cause may develop, he continues to provide a way to think about the search for God, the experience of conversion, the giving of oneself heroically in service, serving the Church's mission, and attentiveness to the direction of the Holy Spirit.
Like the 19th century’s most famous foreign observer and analyst of Jacksonian American society and institutions, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Hecker appreciated the problem posed by the fundamentally fragmented character of American society with its fragile connections among individuals, and the dilemma of how to create a community capable of uniting such free individuals. De Tocqueville and Hecker came from completely different backgrounds, had very different experiences in the Catholic Church, and arrived at their conclusions by very different means. But, already in the 1830s, de Tocqueville had famously recognized both religion’s surprisingly beneficial contribution to American democracy and even more surprisingly acknowledged Catholicism’s utterly unexpected compatibility with American democracy, which would likewise serve as one of Hecker’s bedrock convictions.
Thus, at his very first audience with Blessed Pope Pius IX, on December 22, 1857, in response to the Pope’s concern about factional conflict in the United States, “in which parties get each other by the hair,” Hecker had confidently replied that “the Catholic truth,” once known, “would come between” parties and act like oil on troubled waters.” For Hecker, the Roman Catholic Church, not only represented true religion but was also potentially a powerfully unifying force, binding citizens together, and thus blunting the dangerously sharp cutting edges of conflict and dissension, fusing the private interests of individuals and factions into a common social and civic unity.
Having himself experienced the divided and fragmented character of American religion, Hecker eagerly embraced what the Catholic Church had to offer society, as the divinely sanctioned means for the fulfillment of Christ’s life and mission on earth, pouring the oil of the Holy Spirit on the troubled waters of the world. His high hopes for what the Church has to offer American society remain compelling in our own religiously and otherwise fragmented century, in which the Church is constantly being challenged to incarnate a communal experience of the Body of Christ in the world, which responds to the deepest desires and questions of people both outside and inside the Church.
For all his confidence in providence, however, Hecker recognized that his hopes and expectations would not be fulfilled automatically. He recognized the real limitations of his co-religionists. It was his mission to rouse “sluggish and unfaithful Catholics” from their “apathetic and torpid state.” “The Catholic faith alone,” he famously wrote to Orestes Brownson, “is capable of giving to people a true permanent and burning enthusiasm fraught with the greatest of deeds. But to enkindle this in others we must be possessed of it first ourselves.”
Hecker’s hopes were rooted in personal and communal religious renewal. “The renewal of the age depends on the renewal of religion.”
But what of the country Hecker so much admired and for which he had such high hopes and expectations? Much of what Hecker admired about America, including the egalitarianism and sociability which de Tocqueville analyzed, and which Jacksonian democracy celebrated, no longer characterize the post-industrial, corporate, technocratic, centralized state which the United States has since become, quite apart from any contemporary flirtation with despotism. When it comes to the transforming power of religion, how effective will citizens “be possessed of it themselves” in this very different, late capitalist, increasingly authoritarian society? Changes in society have increased the need for the religious renewal Hecker anticipated, while problematically limiting the prospects for such renewal.
Here some of de Tocqueville’s cautions may be instructive, for he filtered his experience of American democracy through a pre-modern sensibility, which Hecker, despite his conversion and his European formation, largely lacked. Like Hecker, de Tocqueville recognized that, in our modern era of democratic nationalism, religion was perhaps the only resource well positioned to overcome self-interested individualism and hold divided societies together. De Tocqueville, however, was more alert to modern democracy’s potentially corrosive effects upon religion and to how extensively American religion would accommodate religious values to material success and the overwhelming desire for prosperity. Indeed, contemporary experience increasingly confirms the analytical insight that Americans may be more likely to resolve any cognitive dissonance between their religion and their politics by adjusting their religion. (On this, see, for example,, Putnam and Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us, 2010).The extent to which the Church and religion in general have themselves been reimagined by American society and politics rather than acting as the expected agents of cultural conversion stands as one of the single greatest challenges to Hecker’s hopes and expectations.
All this was the case even before the unprecedented present political situation of political authoritarianism in which our country currently finds itself. Situationally better positioned than Hecker to appreciate the classical expectation of democracy’s potential degeneration into despotism, de Tocqueville recognized how the social isolation and alienation from civic life which accompany modern democratic capitalism, while correctable (as Hecker hoped) by religion, could just as likely lead instead to despotism.
Of that, de Tocqueville, unlike Hecker, had direct experience. The despotism of Napoleon III “will last a long time,” de Tocqueville wrote, “because its only obstacle will be itself.” Hecker obviously could not foresee that something analogous would develop in the United States in the 21st century. His exaggerated confidence in American democratic exceptionalism seems no longer tenable, however, and the role he hoped the Church would be able to play in our increasingly failing democracy appears even more problematic.
What are we to make of all this? How can our increasingly fragmented religious energies be renewed and rechanneled to serve once again as “oil on the troubled waters” in a context of accelerating violence, late capitalist divisiveness, and authoritarian democratic despotism?
In the face of all this, what religious, devotional, and pastoral strategies can contemporary American Catholics turn to in order to transcend apathy and torpidity to retrieve the role Hecker had once so hopefully envisioned for the Church in this country?
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